Tuesday, March 24, 2015

10 reasons: Why we need to kill boring ‘learning objectives’!

At the end
of this course you will….” zzzzzzzzz……. How to kill learning before it has even
started. Imagine if every movie started with a list of objectives; “in this
film you will watch the process of a ship sail from Southampton, witness the
catastrophic effect of icebergs on shipping, witness death at sea but understand
that romance will be provided to keep you engaged”. Imagine Abraham Lincoln
listing his objectives before delivering the Gettysburg Address. Imagine each
episode of Breaking Bad starting with its objectives. It makes NO sense.1. First thing dull text
When dealing with learners who need to be motivated, excited and hooked, why prescribe a screenful of boring text as your starting point. This makes no sense, especially online, where first impressions really matter.

2. Over prescriptive

We know
that people make very quick judgments of other people, often in a matter of
seconds, and if you as a teacher are forced to do this prescriptive, unnatural
act before you get a chance to put yourself across as an expert, practitioner
and teacher, you will have got off to the worst possible start. To force
teachers and lecturers to state learning objectives at the start of every
session is to be over-prescriptive.

3. Wrong tone

Anyone who
knows anything about speaking, writing for TV or film, designing web sites or games
or any form of content that needs to keep an audience engaged, knows that
immediate engagement matters. If those first impressions are a bureaucratic
list of objectives, framed in teacher or training-speak, you’ll have set the
wrong dull tone. It’s a behaviourist approach
at odds with what we know about motivation, engagement and attention.

4. Attention killer

Let's take just one example, the phenomenon of arousal or
attention. Arouse people at the start and they will remember more. Yet if the
first experience many learners have is a detailed registration procedure
followed by a dull list of learning objectives, attention is more likely to
fall than rise. There is a strong argument for emotional engagement at the
start of the learning experience, not a jargon-like list of objectives.

5. Gagne misapplied

There’s
always a villain and in this case it’s Gagne. ‘Stating the objectives’ was the
second in his nine steps of instruction. Unfortunately few remember that the
first step was ‘Gaining attention’ THEN ‘Stating objectives’. Most start by
stating objectives putting the second step first. In any case, I have serious
doubts about including the second step at all. Indeed, this nine-step
approach, as I have previously stated, tends to produce formulaic, often uninspiring and
over-long courses.

6. Over-prescriptive behaviourism

It is
important that teachers come across in a way that they feel comfortable with. Education
and training has a habit of using theory, in this case 50-year-old theory, that
simply refuses to budge and gets fossilized into prescriptive rules that
constrict teaching and learning. The problem with this older theory is that it
came when both the theorists and teacher-training world was dominated by
behaviourism. It’s time we moved on.

7. Little learning a dangerous thing

Even if
this were a good practice, it’s not easy and few have the experience to write objectives
well. They end up being short and imprecise lists full of fuzzy terms such as ‘understand’,
‘know’, ‘learn’,‘be aware of’,
‘appreciate’ and so on. Writing a good objective in terms of actual performance, with the pre-requisite conditions (tools, conditions, presumptions), actual
performance in terms of what the learners will know or be able to do and the measurable criterion such as time and so on, is not easy.

8. Time wasted

How much
time is currently wasted by teachers and designers thinking about writing and
delivering learning objectives. Even worse, how much learners’ time is wasted
reading them. Even worse, how much attention and motivation is lost in learners
by being made to sit through this bureaucratic stuff? My guess, especially if
teachers, lecturers, instructors and trainers do this at the start of every
lesson, lecture or module, that the waste is in the many, many millions.

9. Better to Top and tail

Rather than
state learning objectives, we’d be much better focusing on productive
techniques that focus on improved retention. For example, to ‘top and tail’
lectures, modules etc. so that reinforcement of learning takes place through
spaced-practice. Explicit learning objectives are over-prescriptive for
teachers and unnecessary for learners, doing more to hinder than help learning.

10. Student signallingOne excuse is that learning objectives allow the student to see what they're in for and provides goals. Yet how many learners, read the objectives and say 'not for me, I'm out of here'? People on courses are there to stay. And if you really want to stage gfoals, state goals but phrase those goals in terms or real goals personal to the learners - the exam, promotion, reputation.

Conclusion

Note that
I’m not criticising the use of learning objectives or learning outcomes, as
defined by Mager, in the design of courses. That’s a skill and practice
that’s far too often absent in learning professionals. My arguments focus on boring
learning objectives made explicit to learners at the start of a course.

9 Comments:

With you there. The recitation of learning objectives is a classic example of how we squeeze every last drop of life out of a learning experience. Yes, design with objectives. Yes, make it clear why what you are doing will be useful to the learner. List the objectives, please no.

Hi donald i agree that stating them is tedious, prescriptive and 99% of the time, uneccessary.they ae for the designer and deliverer not the learners unless someone actually asks 'why are we doing this'

I always found it quite safe to post the module specification (containing learning outcomes ) on Blackboard as decreed by management. In the unlikely event a student would open the document they would definitely have nodded off at aims/objectives, long before they reached learning outcomes.

Brains remember beginnings and endings. Take that into account when planning your classes. Attention normally falls after 10 minutes, so make sure you do something smart, unexpected but not threatening to let everybody rest every now and then. This short activity could be a joke, a song, or an activity with movement.

Hi I think the inference from useful for course design to useful for learners is wrong. Most of what I successfully learn is mercifully free from the statement of objectives, which, in many cases would limit my reach. Learners need never be xposed to this 'teacher-speak'. They are not a necessary condition for learning.